We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

On Renunciation
Jonathan Kos-Read via Compfight
We are bombarded daily with messages that urge us to satisfy every desire we might have. That’s what consumers do. And that’s exactly what the world has reduced us to: consumers. But what about Jesus’ words in Luke 9:23:
Then Jesus said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”
Richard Beck posted a piece today on renunciation, something we hear less and less about. Renunciation asks us to be the very opposite of consumers. It demands that we lay down our rights and our desires for the sake of our love for God and our love for others. Here’s a thought-provoking excerpt from Richard’s post. We hope you’ll take the time to read the whole piece.
You aren’t denying yourself in order to earn your way into heaven. Self-denial isn’t about collecting spiritual merit badges. Nor are you denying yourself because God is a Puritanical Judge waiting to zap you with lighting bolts if you eat chocolate, dance or have an orgasm.
No, the reason you deny yourself is so that you can make yourself increasingly available to others.
Love requires self-mastery. Love requires a denial of the self.
Love requires discipline.
Love is discipline.
Love involves the renunciation of sin in our lives. A renunciation of wickedness and the Devil.
Category: General
Tags: Jesus, Love, Renunciation, Sacrifice
Related Reading

Seeing and Knowing God
There are many scripture passages that seem to suggest that the way people view God often says more about them than it does about God. Our perception of God, as well as other spiritual truths, is conditioned by the state of our heart. Jesus’ most important teaching on this matter is found in John’s Gospel…

Sermon Clip: The Cross and the Tree
In this short sermon clip, Greg Boyd discusses how Christians should react to the world with love. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were tempted to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They did this because they didn’t understand that God was protecting them. In this sermon, Greg…

Love and Free Will
God could have easily created a world in which nothing evil could ever happen. But this world would not have been capable of love. God could have preprogrammed agents to say loving things and to act in loving ways. He could even have preprogrammed these automatons to believe they were choosing to love. But these…

Jesus, the Word of God
“[T]he standing message of the Fathers to the Church Universal,” writes Georges Florovsky, was that “Christ Jesus is the Alpha and Omega of the Scriptures both the climax and the knot of the Bible.”[1] It was also unquestionably one of the most foundational theological assumptions of Luther and Calvin as well as other Reformers. Hence,…

The Witness of Graffiti (Rocks Crying Out)
Ibrahim Iujaz via Compfight On this eve of Easter, we wanted to share something that fit the mood of the time between the crucifixion and the resurrection. D.L. Mayfield wrote this striking piece on the longing for the Kingdom of God in the midst of overwhelming brokenness. We thought it was the perfect reflection for…